ARM server

I’ve long been skeptical of an ARM transition for Apple Macintosh, but the 2018 iPad Pro has made me a believer. Apple will switch to in-house hardware and this new generation of “ARMacintosh” computers will blow away the rest of the client computing market. And the only way a company could challenge Apple’s escalating dominance in mobile and tablets would be a radical new device.

On this edition of the Gestalt Server News:
– AMD makes a play for the data center with Naples
– AppliedMicron and X-Gene 3 hope to compete with x86
– Microsoft Edge let’s the cat out of the virtual machine bag
Plus: The MacBook Pro dongles you shouldn’t buy!

ARM-based servers in the data center are a lot like free beer, it always seems like you have to wait until tomorrow. Yet, unlike that mythical pint of the latter, we might be getting closer to the day when the former is a common reality. The first of many steps to make that happen is hardware. We’ve seen a few vendors making serious strides in the space. At the end of 2016, Qualcomm showed off their Centriq 2400-series SoC, with 48 cores on a single socket server. Now AppliedMicro is ready to sample their X-Gene 3 ARM server SOC.

I was talking about what I wanted to do for this Raspberry Pi project with a friend, rattling off all the possibilities kind of aimlessly. My friend, rather sheepishly, asked what exactly a Raspberry Pi was. He follows the tech press pretty regularly, and has built a PC or two in his day, but didn’t have a clear understanding. The knowledge gap actually makes sense, given that most times you hear about a Raspberry Pi, it’s about the crazy project someone has done with it. There’s a lot of assumed knowledge there. So let me define the term.

Kaleao is offering what they are referencing as a “true convergence” solution in their KMAX Server. I was naturally a little skeptical, the word convergence gets thrown around with abandon in enterprise IT, and KMAX sounds like a range of Kodak black and white film. But the more I read, the more I was interested.